2000

From crispyneurons

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[edit] 31 December 2000

Scanned the Guatemala photos (finally) and built the Guatemala section. Also resized the Raft of the Medusa image (now located here) to reduce page weight.

[edit] 30 December 2000

Converted all GIF images to PNG format. Added all 23 cantos of Haiku for the Dead under a new top-level section called Random. Dedicated to John Sphere, wherever he may be.

[edit] 29 December 2000

Applied fix to remaining pages. Updated the remaining Compulsions pages to the new design (the tedium is over!). Fixed text formatting in Australia section (Airlie and Cairns). Added *lots* of links to Compulsions.

[edit] 27 December 2000

Solved the remaining HTML 4.0 incompatibilities and applied the fixes to the design template and most of the pages; still need to fix the Compulsions and Yosemite pages. Fixed some glaring formatting problems in the Australia section. Updated the Recreation and Money sections (under Compulsions) to the new design. Now only Art, Ecommerce, Literature, Search Engines, and Space remain. This is tedious work, and going much slower than I expected (translation: since it bores me, I procrastinate.)

[edit] 20 December 2000

I added a custom 404 page to replace the default Apache page. Pat fixed the color on the corner images (thanks!). Cleaned up the News section to Compulsions. Updated the completed portion of the Australia section. Validated CSS on this site using the W3C validator. (The HTML is still not validating.) Also did major copyediting (added formatting, detail) to this page.

[edit] 17 December 2000

Added the Absurdity (now called Demented) section to Compulsions.

[edit] 16 December 2000

Added my resume to the site. DNS issues resolved after much bureaucratic delay courtesy of Register.com.

[edit] 15 December 2000

Hardware is now stable; still a few problems to iron out but nothing huge. I'm actually amazed how smoothly it's gone; when Tim and I when shopping for the components, I seriously doubted that I could get it together unassisted. I installed a second hard drive. This one is 30GB and cost $150, bringing the total disk to 34GB. I then reinstalled Linux. This time I knew what I was doing so it went very smooth. I got Apache and SSH up in no time. Soon the web site is alive again. In other news, I converted the Technology page from the old design to the new one.

[edit] 11 December 2000

Ran into new hardware problems; apparently, the BIOS on the Gateway motherboard was too old to correctly handle the Linux disk partitions I had created. Mass confusion erupted when 2GB of free space magically vanished from my hard drive, due to partition table problems. This computer has had this problem before when it used to be a Windows 95 machine. And now it's back. Since the BIOS update I downloaded from Gateway solved nothing, and since there's every reason to think that (even if I re-OS the box with new partitions) the problem will reappear at any time, I've decided on a more radical solution.

I built an entirely new box from scratch using as many components from the old Gateway as I could, but replacing the old ones where it made sense.

The new box has a new case, motherboard, a 500MHz Athlon processor, and 128MB RAM. It still has the old 4GB hard drive, video card, monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM, floppy drive and cables. I had some problems with the new case that I got from Fry's (basically, it was a piece of junk) so I returned it and got a new one from The Chip Merchant. This one (pictured above) is completely superior. This exercise cost me about $350 and a lot of hassle.

[edit] 7 December 2000

Created Yosemite section. Added this history page.

[edit] 6 December 2000

SOS exposed to the world beyond the firewall for the first time. Now it's a 'real' web site.

[edit] 3-5 December 2000

A flurry of progress. Apache installed and configured.

SSH up and running. I created a design template and began to host web content formatted to this design, beginning with what is now called 'Compulsions.'

[edit] Late November 2000

I finally picked up a copy of Red Hat 7 from Fry's for $29. This time I'm installing from scratch, using a reliable distribution (not pre-hacked). Run into various install problems, but nothing insurmountable, and the box is working. The XFree86 upgrade seems to have solved all the video artifacting problems.

[edit] October 2000

More bad news. My box gets hacked, along with a few others on the same network. It turns out the FTP site that I installed RH6.2 from was compomised. Luckily I had nothing of value on the box anyway. I disable the box until I find time to deal with the problems.

[edit] September 2000

First pass at installing Red Hat Linux 6.2 on my spare machine, a Gateway 200MHz Pentium Pro with 64MB RAM and 4GB disk. It doesn't go well; XFree86 hates my video card. I'm disgusted to learn that the user is expected to know the monitor's vertical and horizontal scan rates in order to get XFree86 running; after much research I found the needed information on a site in Japan.

Still, all this research does little good; all kinds of video glitches are still present, and it makes using the GUI more of a fantasy than a reality. (Why do I need a GUI on a web server, you might ask? Because I need a browser to find software to install on the box. I'm not using command-line browsers, because they suck.) I re-OSed the box several times to try different solutions, but none work; and since I can't solve the problem, I leave it be. Perhaps the new version of Red Hat will address the problems.

[edit] August 2000

I purchased a new computer for home use. Now I can use the old box (a Gateway G6-200) as a Linux server.

[edit] July 2000

I purchased the three domains that point to this site: signofstorms.com, signofstorms.net, and signofstorms.org.